These interesting essays, thirteen by prominent Mexicans and two by Frenchmen, were originally papers given at the “round tables” held at the Institut Français d’Amérique Latine in 1962. The book serves as a special tribute to François Chevalier on his departure after directing the Institute for more than a decade, a period in which he organized the mesas redondas and in general stimulated Mexican historical study.
The essays, most of them brief and undocumented, vary considerably in subject and approach. The largest group treats the broadly social and cultural aspects of the French intervention and French influence in Mexico. Evident throughout is the close cultural affinity between France and Mexico, and several of the contributers are openly francophile. The most suggestive of these cultural essays is Mauricio Gómez Mayorga’s discussion of the commanding French influence in Mexican urbanism and architecture. In Mexico City, he maintains, “the years of the Reforma and of the Empire became the same” (p. 188); it was Juárez and particularly Díaz who carried to completion Maximilian’s Parisian urban planning. Thus Gómez Mayorga suggests that artistic continuity was strengthened rather than disrupted by the political conflict of 1854-1867. Other essays treat such subjects as Maximilian’s liberal legislation, “the recovery of Mexican pride” in 1862, the political bibliography of the intervention, and the reestablishment of Franco-Mexican relations after 1867.
The outstanding contribution (“Conservateurs et liberaux aux Mexique”) is by François Chevalier himself. It supplements two earlier articles on the preindependence period and the Zapata revolt. The three pioneering works form the basis of what hopefully will become a major study in the sociology of political conflict in modern Mexico. Chevalier is here especially concerned with identifying the social and geographical background of the political factions between 1821 and 1867. For instance, he finds that the conservatives drew from Spanish textile manufacturers and Indian caciques (reacting against liberal attacks on communal property), as well as from the church and army. On the other side Chevalier distinguishes the “classical” liberals from the adherents of “tendencies which could be called social or pre-agrarianist” (p. 19). The former were mostly provincial lawyers but also included landowners who could benefit from liberal reforms. The latter were more varied in background. Chevalier’s essay is wide-ranging and suggestive, without pretending to arrive at definitive conclusions.
It should be noted that Chevalier tends to downgrade the role of ideas in nineteenth-century Mexico. He makes a number of valuable suggestions on ideological questions, but his basic assumption is that the social and economic underpinning of politics is more crucial than ideas. At the outset, he states that “the principles and the ideas that [liberals and conservatives] made use of, largely inspired by Europe and the United States, are well enough known” (p. 9). Technically, this is true. Yet if one goes beyond general statements about intellectual origins to isolate which particular currents of thought influenced Mexico and why, then the matter becomes more obscure. It is insufficient and even misleading to say, for instance, that the liberal lawyers were mostly “admirers of the Encyclopedists, of Rousseau, of Adam Smith, and their followers in the nineteenth century (notably Benjamin Constant)” (p. 20). To cite one example, the proponents of Constant in Mexico shared their mentor’s strong hostility to Rousseau, a fact which explains much in Mexican constitutional politics.
One danger inherent in Chevalier’s approach is that it can (perhaps inadvertently) underrate the contemporary significance of “classical” liberalism as doctrinaire and seemingly detached from socioeconomic reality. One senses here a special emphasis on pre-agrarianist manifestations—the precursors of twentieth-century revolution— even though as Chevalier admits, they were marginal at the time. In sum, a critical analysis of ideas must be weighted equally with sociology if we are properly to understand nineteenth-century political conflict.
